The Very Real Danger Of Over Optimization Part 2 – Links

Links, Links, Links! If you want to get to page 1 of Google there is no doubt that you need them. However if you are only focusing on shear numbers or you are acquiring too many of the wrong types of links you are in real danger of getting penalized for over-optimization. Let’s take a quick look at what types of links search engines are looking for as well as how much is too much.

All of the most popular search engines today still use links as a significant determining factor in how they rank websites and while having a large number of links pointed to a site can be a good thing the quality of those links is even more important. It is fairly easy to to get large numbers of links to your website but they will mostly likely be of low quality which can make trying to get to page 1 an uphill battle. Some examples of these low quality likes are poor quality directories, blog comments, links farms and reciprocal links. The internet is full of companies or people offering large volumes of these kinds of links for cheap. Buying them is a waste of time and money.

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If you are looking for directory links there are only a few good ones:

The second factor you need to pay attention to when building links to your site is anchor text. This is the actual word or phrase which links to your site. Gone are the days when all you needed to do was to get hundreds or thousands of sites to link to you using “Toronto real estate” in order to get to page 1. Doing this will have the opposite effect. Take, for example this site:

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Over-optimized anchor text

It is pretty clear that this site has gone to the extreme to get 426 separate website to link to them using the exact same anchor text. As a result they fail to rank for either “Forest Hill” or “Toronto real estate”. The reason is simple. As far as Google is concerned it is not natural for so many sites to link to this website using the exact same phrase and therefore it is a an indication of trying to manipulation the search engines.

If the majority of the anchor text of the links pointed to your site are simply your website URL (ie. www.abcrealty.com) or your company name that is perfectly acceptable. In fact in the eyes of Google it makes sense that a large percentage of a site’s links would be simply their web address or name. Even though these links do not contain your target keyword phrases they still help to contribute to the overall authority of your website which means you will need less keyword-rich links pointed to your site.

You will still want to acquire links to your site that use your targeted keyword phrases but use variations of it. For example if your target phrase is “Toronto real estate” then use things like “real estate in Toronto”, “Toronto real estate market”, “Toronto real estate listings”, “real estate guide for Toronto” etc. And do not over do it. Remember that you want to get the best quality links directed at your site.

With search engine optimization there are no short cuts to the front of the line and while this type of linking strategy does take more time and effort it is well worth it if you want to achieve lasting results.